Reddit mentions of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States

I loved living in SF but to be honest unless you are a startup founder, in Y Combinator, maybe, or VERY early startup hire with extreme equity I don't think living in SF is tenable. The city's dysfunctional housing and taxation politics are almost unbelievable. Jerry Brown has been trying to fix the problem but has not been successful.

The choices are exit, voice, or loyalty. I tried voice and failed. Exit was and is better for me as an individual.

Read criticisms on international aid and development now or in college. There have been very many good ones written in the past 15 years or so about aid effectiveness, programming, results monitoring, and philosophy. The industry for the past couple of years has been undergoing some soul-searching as it struggles to quantify its positive impact and worth, and those pressures will only increase with the prevailing atmosphere of world politics.

The approaches I'm familiar with are the "Politics Matters" crowd which is trying to approach development with a greater focus on the politics of the countries they are working in and how to deal with that. There's some background context here involving the Washington Consensus and its failure, and a long-running development industry focus on technical assistance, financial support, and conditional loans, which is shifting. Some good reading that may be a little early for you as a junior in high school but you could maybe glean some insights from it:

Adrian Leftwich on Thinking and Working Politically

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by AO Hirschmann

Overseas Development Institute's Thinking and Working Politically Reading Pack

Doing Development Differently community's book they're centered around Harvard I believe, it's free

As others have said a technical focus will help you get an initial job (and one that might even actually pay well), but you can enter as a generalist it's just harder. I kind of half-heartedly studied economics as an undergrad and that was my only higher education but I managed to find a niche in development for many years (and may return to it in a few years). Development agencies and international NGOs fetishize advanced degrees, almost everyone else I met in the industry who was at a program management level and above had at least a master's and many had a Ph.D, except for me. I never felt hamstrung in actual work terms by my lack of an advanced degree, but it is hard to get your foot in the door without one. I just luckily stumbled upon a boss and mentor who didn't really care about those unwritten rules who gave me my start and then helped me lift myself up continuously throughout my career.

I would also highly recommend learning a language, and like u/travelingag recommended study a lot of history, especially focusing on modern history of the last ~150 or so years. I can't say whether going deep is better than going broad, but definitely (obviously) focus on undeveloped areas of the world where int. development organizations work. It would be a big waste of time to study a bunch of European history if you want to work on development.

By what metric can you determine when bad press is warranted and not a temper-tantrum?

Are you telling me that no one is allowed to criticize anything a company does as long as they can choose not to buy that company's product? Do you know no economic theory?

I honestly can't tell if you are trolling or not.

In the case that you are not, here is a quick read on pertinent economic theory: http://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organizations/dp/0674276604

To put it one way: the primary two options customers have to give a company feedback is exit (not buying the product) and voice (bad press). Exit prevents them from receiving money they already would have received, and voice prevents them from getting new customers.

It is actually much more complicated (and more like a symbiosis) but it should be easy enough to see that voice is a perfectly valid form of expressing discontent with a company's product.

When there is disagreement/conflict within an organization, there can be several options for the minority (other than violence)

• Voice - try to persuade the majority
  
• Loyalty - accede to the majority
  
• Exit - leave and form a different organization
  
  Secession has a negative connotation (for understandable reasons), but it shouldn't. The threat of Exit needs to be there, it's healthy for the entire organization if a minority isn't trapped and has the Exit card to play if needed.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is also a fun political game theory book.